Large, industrial production of biological commodities are currently still limited in variety and quantity. In Western Canada, the two biggest examples of large-scale, industrial applications of living cells are for the bioremediation of soluble toxic, organic compounds discharged by chemical industries in their wastewaters; and for the production of anyhydrous ethanol as a liquid fuel to be mixed with gasoline. This report discusses some current research activities in the field of biochemical engineering related to these two activities. Both processes are initiallly treated from the perspective of bioreactions which are characterized in terms of their kinetics. With this information, the design of effective bioreactor systems are presented and it is demonstrated that productivities can be improved by factors of two orders of magnitude by the incorporation of traditional chemical engineering vessel designs such as cascaded, well-mixed tanks or packed bed columns. The incorporation of these traditional chemical engineering principles not only improves productivity but also prevents air stripping losses of toxic, volatile chemicals and reduces the production cost of ethanol to about $0.35/L.